Gender And Politics Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The study of gender and politics in political science rests on an initial body of research that established women as a politically relevant group for political scientific analysis and sex as a political variable. A small number of early influential studies of women and politics can be identified, the best known of which is Maurice Duverger’s The Political Role of Women (1955), a work commissioned in part in response to transnational feminist demands for empirical research on women’s political and economic status. By the mid-1900s, developments such as quantitative databases based on large, nationally representative samples, the apparent ease of identifying the sex of survey respondents, and computer-facilitated quantitative analysis allowed for the generation of research on sex-related differences in mass political behavior and preferences. By the 1970s this research, increasingly informed by developments in feminist political thought and by feminist movement mobilization in North America and Western Europe, provided the foundation for moving from research on women and politics to a gendered analysis of politics. Although gender and sex are related concepts in political science research, their relationship continues to be debated among political theorists and empirical scholars in the discipline.

Defining Sex

It is worth noting that, for many decades, political science engaged primarily in single-sex research, in which sex was not a variable but a constant. Male political elites, male elected officials, and men as citizens and voters were the central focus of political science research and theory and, in some cases, the exclusive concern of the discipline. The development of a disciplinary subfield of women and politics research shifted the treatment of sex as a constant to sex as a variable; feminist theorizing made women visible in political theory.

In political science, as early as 1974, with Wilma Rule Krauss’s article “Political Implications of Gender Roles,” “gender” emerged as a variable distinct from “sex,” with sex treated as “a biological fact” and gender expressed through “gender identity.” The variable “sex” was based on state-assigned sex classification, generally at birth, as male or female. The variable of “gender roles,” related to but distinct from “sex,” was understood as sets of traits and behaviors considered to be “feminine” or “masculine.” Sex as a dichotomous variable, operationalized as “male” and “female,” was found to have limited analytical utility, however. Sex-based political research on women has served more to correct and to modify previous research concerning sex-related differences than it has to develop complex models of the political meanings of sex; nonetheless, it has provided the foundation upon which a gendered analysis of politics is being constructed. The distinction of sex and gender, as separate variables, has clarified, empirically, the socially constructed features of masculinity, femininity, sexualities, and structural meanings of gender, distinct from biological assumptions about sex and sex difference. As political scientists asked questions that could not be answered by employing sex as a political variable—for example, do party nomination rules structure internal party competition to advantage male rather than female candidates? Why do numbers of elected women increase in the aftermath of war?—they began to turn to gender as a concept for purposes of political analysis; they also turned to, and relied heavily on, gendered research in anthropology, history, labor studies, psychology, sociology, women’s studies, and sexuality studies as well as on theoretically related work being developed in regard to race and research on the intersections of race, class, and gender.

Defining Gender

Gender as a concept in political research is conventionally understood as sets of socially constructed meanings of masculinities and femininities derived from context-specific identifications of sex, that is, male and female, men and women. These meanings emerge from stereotypes about male and female behavior, from “characteristics people tend to associate with women and men, femaleness and maleness” (as Beth Reingold writes in her 2000 book Representing Women, p. 47), from normative assumptions about appropriate behaviors of men and women, and from social structures of power. As Nancy Bur ns noted in “Gender: Public Opinion and Political Action” (2002, p. 463–464), “Gender is a repertoire of mechanisms that provide social interpretations of sex, that enable sex to structure people’s lives. Gender is a set of ways in which people and institutions make sex matter. Gender is a principle of social organization. Gender is a hierarchy.” Gender represents both the outcomes and processes of human actors and institutions in developing meanings about a range of femininities and masculinities that are not “natural” but are identifiable social and political constructions. As Iris Marion Young concluded in her essay “Modernity, Emancipatory Values, and Power, ”Gender is . . . a set of ideational and social structural relationships that people move through, rather than attributes they have attached to their persons” (p. 493).

Gender and the political are mutually constitutive, and hence a central question for scholars of women, gender, and politics is how gender and politics interact to construct hierarchies of political power. Gender produces and transforms political inequalities, privileging most men in relationship to most women but also privileging some women in regard to other women and to some men. At the same time, political institutions, laws, and political practices construct gender, identifying appropriate political actors as primarily (or exclusively) male, establishing masculine behaviors as normative and fitting political institutions to a model of the male actor. As Lisa Baldez writes in her 2007 work “Intersectionality,” because “gender never . . . operates independently of other aspects of political life, . . . it is misleading to think of gender as an autonomous category of analysis” (p. 229).

Gender has multiple meanings that rely on context and that change across time. No universal content emerges from “sex” that gives single and universal meaning to gender; the identification of a person as male or female does not automatically indicate that person’s political behavior, political preferences, or location in political hierarchies of power. As Laurel Weldon notes in her 2006 article on “The Structure of Intersectionality,” “Gender norms and practices vary across groups of women and men as well as across nations, regions, generations, and cultural groups” (p. 238), and across age, race, and time. These norms and practices also have “multiple logics”; that is, their development, workings, and functions differ according to context. The political implications of gender, as a result, were different for white working-class women in the United States in 1942 than they were for black women in the southern United States in 1962 or for northern Italian upper-class women in 1982 or for Hutu Rwandan women in 2002. In these examples, all individuals are “women,” but the gendered political meanings and power for these groups of women differ substantially. How gender works for these women, and for other women and for men, cannot be assumed on the basis of sex. The extent to which women and men are differently politically empowered is a matter for empirical research and political theorizing.

Gendered meanings and structures, such as “welfare recipient,” “labor movement,” “suicide bomber,” and “Parent Teacher Association,” intersect with and mutually constitute those of, for example, race, class, and caste. It is not yet clear, however, how they do so. Intersections of gender with race, class, and other politically relevant categories have yet to be fully theorized and developed for empirical analysis. As AngeMarie Hancock observes in the 2007 article “Intersectionality as a Normative and Empirical Paradigm,” relationships among intersectional categories remain “an open empirical question” (p. 251), for the location of such intersections and for the identification of how such intersections function politically in gendered terms. An appreciation of gender as multiple and intersectional responds to the theoretical and empirical research undertaken in race studies and gender studies, although, according to Hancock, “a comprehensive intellectual history of intersectionality research” has yet to be published (p. 249), and its impact on gendered political research remains to be assessed.

Gender In Political Research

How does gender as a concept function in political science research? Gender, unlike sex, can serve as both an independent and a dependent variable. Gender and the political are reciprocal in nature; in political science, scholars examine “the particular and contextually specific ways in which politics constructs gender and gender constructs politics,” as Joan Scott writes in her 1986 article “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis” (p. 1070). Insofar as gender is constructed by state and society—for example, who counts as a citizen, the extension of nationality to spouses of men but not of women, the extension of rights to men but not women, policies protecting workers in male-dominated workforce that do not encompass work primarily undertaken by women—gender functions as an effect or outcome of human agency and politics. Because gender also serves to construct political choices and outcomes, it can function as a determinant of such phenomena. As Helen Irving writes in Gender and the Constitution (2008), “Formal equality can produce unequal results; where similar treatment is offered to persons who are not similarly situated, further disadvantage for the disadvantaged can be the outcome” (p. 2). Furthermore, gender can function both as a categorical concept and as a dynamic process concept for political research.

Employing gender as a category involves the “multidimensional mapping of socially constructed, fluid, politically relevant identities, values, conventions, and practices conceived of as masculine and/or feminine, with the recognition that masculinity and femininity correspond only fleetingly and roughly to ‘male’ and ‘female,’” as Karen Beckwith writes in her 2005 article “A Common Language of Gender?” (p. 131). Gender as a category variable has utility in its classification of “feminine and masculine behaviors, actions, attitudes and preferences” and its impact on “particular outcomes, such as military intervention, social movement success, and electoral choice, among others” (p. 131). Recent research on gendered campaign strategies of women and men running for office, on gendered media behaviors of male and female candidates, and on gendered interactions among women and men in national parliaments are examples of the utility of gender as a category variable. For example, Dianne Bystrom and her coauthors, in Gender and Candidate Communication (2004), found that women running for elective office in the United States developed specifically gendered campaign styles designed to transcend—or to take advantage of—stereotypes about female candidates and women in politics. Kathleen Dolan, in her 2004 Voting for Women, found that voters held gendered assumptions about policy issues, about women’s and men’s likelihood of promoting some issues rather than others, and about ideology; in her 2008 review of the scholarship on female candidates in the United States, she found that “women candidates of both parties [are] seen as more liberal than their male counterparts but also they are perceived as more liberal than they actually are” (p. 116).

Mary Hawkesworth, in her 2003 article “Congressional Enactments of Race-Gender,” for the U.S. Congress, and Joni Lovenduski, in her 2005 book Feminizing Politics, for the British House of Commons, found structures and practices in each institution that shaped differences in access to power and influence between men and women in these national legislatures. Examples include differences in treatment by colleagues, where, as Hawkes worth found (pp. 538–539), female legislators were explicitly excluded from Congressional committee press conferences and remained unrecognized for speaking by their male colleagues, and where female members of Congress employed techniques akin to “groveling” to influence their male peers, “[indicating] a power dynamic that Congresswomen of color must take into account in devising their legislative strategies” (p. 538).These indicate the ways in which gender can be identified and employed as a category variable for political analysis.

In contrast, gender as a process concept functions to identify “the differential effects of apparently gender-neutral structures and policies upon women and men, and upon masculine and/or feminine actors,” as Beckwith observes (2005, 132), as well as the behaviors of individual women and men to shape structures and policies to a specifically gendered outcome. Examples of such research include studies of the gendered impact of electoral rules, nomination procedures, and policymaking and other decision-making processes, where structures, procedures, and practices produce outcomes that advantage some men and disadvantage some men. Lovenduski describes “a deeply embedded culture of masculinity that pervades political institutions in Britain . . . manifested in the agenda-setting, formulation and implementation stages of the policy process” (2005, 48, 53), ranging from the adversarial debating style of parliamentary speeches to explicit, articulated sexism by members of Parliament (2005, 54–56). Other examples are the gendered outcomes of democratic transitions and other regime changes, of military interventions, of war and revolution, and of mass mobilizations such as strikes and protests, where the disruption of traditional gender roles, abolition of previous political institutions, dissolution of political party systems, and other major changes can create opportunities for women’s political empowerment.

Gender as process is also evidenced, for example, in the strategic decisions and actions of women and men in constructing new political systems, drafting constitutions, negotiating party alliances, and organizing transnational social movement campaigns. Gender employed as a process variable moves beyond, for example, differentiating between foreign policy preferences of male and female elites to a focus on the ways in which institutional structures and practices shape the interactions, alliance formation, and discourses available to and influenced by male and female political elites in foreign policy decision making. Gender as a process variable also helps to reveal how states and institutions become gendered; that is, how states adopt and accommodate structures that create and confirm gendered political differences, such as an all-male military, girls’ exclusion from state or religious-based educational institutions, and workplace protections for industrial workers.

Joan Acker, in her 1992 article “From Sex Roles to Gendered Institutions,” defines gendered institutions as those where “gender is present in the processes, practices, images and ideologies, and distributions of power in the various sectors of social life” and she recognizes that “the institutional structures of . . . societies are organized along lines of gender” (p. 567). Other state-focused gender research has turned to issues of gender in institutions and in political institutional development, how institutions structure gender and mobilize women, and how organized women actively work to restructure (and hence to retender) institutional structures. For example, Louise Chappell’s book Gendering Government (2002) found, for Australia and Canada, that relatively similar feminist movements, facing different institutional arrangements, developed state-specific strategies to achieve their goals, strategies that included crafting changes within each state. As activist women responded to the political opportunities offered by state structures, they mobilized in ways that shifted each state in terms of gender, creating new avenues for women’s influence. In Australia, with “high federal political capacity,” effective women’s policy agencies at the national level, and norms that accommodated advocacy of gender interests, organized women employed a strategy of internal, insider bureaucratic positioning and external lobbying vis-à-vis parliament (pp. 159–163, 173). In contrast, Canada offered different opportunities for advancing women’s interests, primarily through constitutional measures, such as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which, as Alexandra Dobrowolsky shows in her 2003 chapter “Shifting States,” activist women helped to forge. Dobrowolsky found that activist women were particularly successful in developing new, women-friendly political institutions in Scotland with the opportunities afforded by the prospect of a Scottish Parliament (pp. 133–139).

Work of this type, analyzing the gendered nature of institutions, according to Acker, demonstrates the states’ susceptibility to influence. Not only do states and other institutions express, practice, and shape gender; they are also responsive to the attempts by political actors to regender them; that is, to recast the terms and contexts of state and institutional arrangements, practices, and discourses in order to leverage political advantage and to increase strategic political opportunities and outcomes along gender lines.

Focusing on gender as a concept that functions independently and dependently, conceptualized as category and/or process, allows scholars, as Corrine McConnaughy writes in her 2007 article “Seeing Gender over the Short and Long Haul,” to “[account for] the interaction of gendered identities and attitudes, social location, and political context” (p. 380). This permits us to treat gender as “a meta-concept, to construct meaningfully distinguished concepts within it, and then to model explicitly those concepts and their interactions” (p. 380; emphasis in original).

What gender as a concept does for political science is to provide an analytical strategy for the political and politicized relations of power between and among women and men that cannot be fully or clearly identified or analyzed by a reliance on sex as a variable. Research using gender and sex as variables still includes the counting of self-identified women and men, interpretation of regression analyses that include a sex variable (see Nancy Burns’s 2005 article “Finding Gender”), and analyses of the presence of men and women in political institutions. Gender, however, has moved political research further toward the heart of disciplinary research, with foci on the social, activist, and legal constructions of empowered and/or disempowered women and men across intersectional ties of, for example, race, class, caste, sexuality, and nationality; on the imbrications of gender and power in institutions; and on the strategic employment of masculinities and femininities in constructing and gaining political power. Gender also makes clear the imposed, involuntary political differences and inequalities imposed upon (and often resisted by) women, revealing the gendered and racialized dichotomies of, for example, enfranchisement, access to office, legal status, and provision of government benefits.

Conclusions About Gender In Political Science

Although political science may not yet have a common language of gender, two common defining components are evident. First, gender is socially constructed. Despite some disputes concerning the relationship between sex and gender, or the utility of gender as a concept, scholars of women, gender, and politics concur that gender is a social construction of political import that marks neither natural nor essential qualities of individuals or institutions. As a result, gender can be seen in—and is useful in analyzing—the construction of political institutions, the development of political practices, the crafting of new constitutions, and the resolution of wars and revolutions.

Second, gender reveals power differences. Scholars of gender and politics recognize that the effects of gender are not neutral. Gender constitutes a constructed set of differences among sexed persons in terms of relations of dominance and subordination that are systematic and structural, although the processes of their construction and their specific consequences are matters for empirical investigation. As Acker reminds us, gender signifies “the patterning of difference and domination through [socially and culturally constructed] distinctions between women and men that is integral to many societal processes” (1992, 565). Gender is worked to structure—or to undermine—power differences between and among women and men. As Scott concludes, “Gender is one of the recurrent references by which political power has been conceived, legitimated, and criticized” (1986, 1073).

A third defining component is emerging from research on gender and institutions (including the political economy): the recognition that a focus on gender, rather than sex, permits analysis of gender as structured in institutions, processes, and practices, independent from any specific human actors. As structures are developed through human agency, which individual human actors are at issue and how they are gendered become inscribed in the structures themselves. Such inscriptions have staying power and persist beyond the presence (and, often, lives) of the original actors. Institutions, processes, and practices developed primarily (or exclusively) by men are structured with identifiable masculinities which, developed in women’s absence (or exclusion), persist in producing and replicating inequalities in political power. As Burns writes, where we “find gender” is not only in individuals, but in political and other institutions. Gender “is made and remade across . . . institutions in ways that build linkages across institutions. . . . Without taking simultaneous account of the host of institutions in which women and men operate, scholars are not likely to understand the causes and scope of disadvantage” (2005, 139).

For scholars undertaking gender and politics research, operationalizing gender as a category concept for empirical research continues to be problematic. Analyses of female and male political elites, and of women and men as, for example, voters, political activists, and members of the military and other state authorities, have had to continue to rely primarily on a dichotomized sex variable as a surrogate for the multidimensional variable of gender. As Reingold observes, employing the terminology of gender in such a context can result in

evoking age-old sexual stereotypes: gender (the activities and values associated with women and men) gets affixed to sex (women and men in public office) as if it were an accurate and exhaustive descriptor of the actual behavior and attitudes of all such women and men. . . . Recognition of gender difference gets translated into expectations of dichotomous, stable and universal sex differences.” (2000, 48–49)

Despite such risk, one strategy has been nonetheless to employ the terminology of “gender” rather than “sex” in such research, to signal a recognition of the nature of the social construction underlying the categories with which scholars are working and to disrupt any presumptions of the foundationality of sex for politics. A future project for gender and politics scholars will be the development of operationalizations of gender variables in contexts where sex currently must suffice.

Sex and gender continue to be linked conceptually and theoretically, even as they are conceptually distinct concepts. This is the case in part because political science still lacks a wide range of knowledge, especially comparative and longitudinal, about women’s political behavior, political beliefs and attitudes, means of organizing, behavior in governmental office, experience in campaigning, response to power inequalities, and exclusion from political power—among other concerns. The subfield of women and politics research still requires this basic, investigatory, cumulative research. In this regard, our major concern with women and politics has not been precluded by, or surpassed by, a focus on gender. Fortunately, as Fiona Mackay reminds us in her 2004 article “Gender and Political Representation in the UK” (p. 114), feminist theoretical developments continue to inform and to hone gender as a political science concept, in order “to bridge the gap between sophisticated theorizing about gender and the operationalization of workable concepts for empirical research.”

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